You're forgetting about UEFI, guys. UEFI is a graphical environment; all new computers have it including the new Windows 8 computers and windows 7 ultimate supports it. UEFI (unified Extensible Firmware interface) is an entire OS, and there are talks of having System Access run from within it. Window-Eyes could do that same; it might be complicated, but the older BIOS is going by the wayside, and people need to move with the technologies. In fact, just for the sheer hell of it, I'm thinking of converting my existing installation from BIOS to UEFI; the usage of the BIOS interface is a holdover from Windows 7.
-----Original Message----- From: Thomas N. Chan [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, July 03, 2013 4:56 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: WinPE Tech Tools What the challenge in today market are, every motherboard maker uses different version of the BIOS, different of BIOS software which includes HP, Dell, IBM and a few other brand out there. It will be much greater challenger to talk to each of them as they all generally have different core software in them. in order for a software maker to do that, they will have quite often patches to talk to new core. The software itself, its almost quite impossible as no hardware are loaded or started beforehand. It's the BIOS we are talking about. Only part of the ram or vram are touch in such boot up sufficient for the BIOS to be controlling or configuring part of the hardware within the motherboard. Unless someone is going to push some chip standard, some sort of ways to talk to the chip directly, else, software level at this stage is quite, almost impossible. -------------------- regards Thomas N. Chan From: Cory Martin [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, 3 July 2013 1:09 PM To: [email protected] Subject: OT: WinPE Tech Tools Katherine, I am sending this to the list because while it is kind of off topic, it might be of interest to many. I recently did a podcast on a program called Winstaller from Levtec. Sadly his website has been down for the last few days so not sure what's up, but I do have both his Winstaller and Core Recovery products. Basically Winstaller creates talking Windows installers that load NVDA during the WinPE phase so you can run disk part to configure your disk, or run system repair, install Windows, Etc. Essentially, while you can still automate the installation process, you can also choose not to do so. I also have a program which he produced which is called Core Recovery, which loads NVDA along with a Windows imager and access to HWInfo and the command line to run other portable tools of a thumb drive. Both of these things do work, so hopefully his development of htem will continue. While getting Window Eyes to run in a Windows PE environment might be a bit of a challenge given that it is a more complex product, just wanted to show you that there are options in the works out there. You can listen to my demo of Winstaller here: http://www.nerdball.net/2013/06/22/levtec-brings-us-windows-installations-wi th-speech-windows-unattend-files-are-now-obsolete-thanks-to-winstaller/ Sadly I don't have one recorded for Core Recovery as of yet. I'm waiting for a suitable demo environment, such as a crashed copy of Windows. Enjoy, Cory On 02/07/2013 1:24 PM, Katherine Moss wrote: I'm sorry to bust your buttons,, but I don't think that there is any such thing as "one hundred percent accessible" simply due to the way accessibility is portrayed in frameworks; it's optional and not required, and making it required would break the consistency of the sighted developing world causing hundreds of hours of unexplained agrevation for people who don't understand why their code won't compile when it looks right to their eyes. As a training administrator of Windows systems and beyond, I'd like to see more accessibility efforts put into the pre-boot environments that computers can enter such as the Intel Out-of-band management interfaces, the SBUU and recovery interface from Dell, the UEFI interface used as the booting process for newer computers and those converted from the legacy BIOS interface, as well as the environments provided by WinPE and those from other venders. I see no reason why just because we are visually impaired we should have to require so much sighted assistance when installing and troubleshooting windows systems under preOS environments. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv.
